Jia Rebecca Li

Welcome. Whatever the reason that has brought you here, you just took a significant step in taking care of your needs. I work with both individuals and couples/families. My work focuses on the following three areas of personal and relational distress. Depression, anxiety and relationship challenges are common in all these areas. (1) Couple Therapy: I work with couples to address infidelity, high conflict communication, intimacy issues, parenting conflict, significant adjustments (e.g., becoming parents, retirement, and career change), grief and loss (e.g., fertility challenges; miscarriage; illness; death in the family), extended family relationship, mixed race couples, blended families, etc. This psychotherapy modality puts the relationship dynamics front and center while requiring skilled attunement to each partner. These multiple challenges are often unfamiliar to therapists without training in this modality. I have completed significant training with - The Gottman Institute (Level I and Level II certified) (link) - Hakomi Institute - Hakomi Experiential Couples Psychotherapy - Terry Real's Real Life Therapy (Level I certified) plus multiple workshops and an ongoing monthly consultation group - The Couples Institute (Menlo Park, CA) - Developmental Model of Couples Therapy - Dr. Marty Klein, on sexuality and intimacy. I continue to prioritize professional development in this area, including frequent workshops with leading couple therapists and an ongoing consultation group with Terry Real. (2) Grief and Loss: I work primarily with traumatic and complex grief and anticipatory grief, both in individual therapy and with families. My clinical work with grief started at Kara, a Palo Alto based grief agency, where for three years I worked extensively with spouse loss, child loss, suicide loss, sudden death, victims of crimes, and other traumatic grief clients. I also facilitated grief groups for spouse loss, suicide loss and teen grief. Outside of my private practice, I remain a member of Kara’s community outreach team and continue to facilitate debriefings for local companies, organizations and families to address difficult death/crisis situations, including, most recently, pandemic impact and hate crimes. (3) Life Transition: Transition is our inner process to cope with external changes. I work with phase-of-life transitions including emerging adulthood, new family formation, becoming parents, retirement, and career transition. In addition, I work with individuals on their significant relationship changes. Transition starts with an ending, develops through an often long “in-betweens” before the start of a new beginning. A challenging transition often involves grief and loss about the ending as well as anxiety and ambivalence about the adjustment and future. Culture, Race and Ethnicity. My clients are a good representation of the cultural diversity in the SF Bay Area. Cultural issues challenge more than just immigrants (new or old), minorities, or mix-racial families but ALL of us regardless of our race or ethnicity. My experiences as an immigrant and world traveler, living and working in different cultures and places of the world, and developing and transitioning through multiple professional careers have cultivated my capacity for compassion, empathy and curiosity. I genuinely seek to understand each individual, couple and family from multiple lens including family history, socioeconomic background, education, race and ethnicity, culture, gender identity and assumptions, and phase of life. I offer psychotherapy in Mandarin if that’s your preferred language of care and self-expression.